Grizzled vets ponder how a new war will affect today’s service members
By David Wood
Newhouse News Service
Re-printed from Navy Times
18 November 2002 Issue
BERKLEY, Mass. — Haltingly, the stories take shape around the back table
of American Legion Post 121, where the haze of cigarette smoke thickens and
the carefully nursed beer bottles sweat in pooled rings under the cozy light
of a single overhead bulb.They are stories of men and women in war, stories
of the sea, of rice paddies and deserts and frozen mountains. They reflect
not bravado, but pain and loss.
The aircraft crash and burning flesh. Men torpedoed into the North Atlantic’s heaving icy darkness. The infantry platoon under rocket attack pouring return fire into a building, only to discover it was an orphanage, and tenderly carrying out the small broken bodies, sobbing with horror and guilt and anger, all of that still powerful, back home decades later.The stories come once again, unwelcome things crawling out of the darkness, because once again politicians are threatening to send young Americans off to war.
Because those who survive combat in Iraq, if it comes to that,
will come home a new generation of veterans.Gathered here, the grizzled men
wonder: In 10 years or 20 or 30, will anyone take care of the new ones? Help
shoulder their burdens?
Listen to their stories? Even know who they are?For in all today’s talk
of war — in the rousing political speeches and experts’ sound-bite
wisdom, in the leaked invasion plans and solemn pronouncements about how smooth
“regime change” might be — there has been no acknowledgment
that a debt will be owed to those who do the hard physical work of battle.
“Now they’re gonna put people in another war? It
makes me chill,” said Jon Nemes, 55, a retired Boston firefighter who
served as an Air Force commando in Vietnam and now commands the Veterans of
Foreign Wars Post 5988 in Bourne,
on Cape Cod.
“People need to understand, before we go off to war, do
we want to pay for these guys down the road? Because the flags and confetti
are nice, but it’s the aftermath of war, for the veteran, that we need
to be talking about — now.”The veterans
of America’s past wars form a line 25 million long, and it is ironic
that they seem to be such a familiar icon. Despite the stereotype of the soldier
traumatized by war, their experiences for the most part are acknowledged neither
by the men and women themselves nor by the society they served.
They are war’s working classes, who went as 19- or 20-year-olds, well trained in the science of war and often touchingly naive about the art of life. Most had little concept of the immensity of what lay before them. And they served under intense stress as sailors, air crewmen, divers, infantry grunts, nurses, helicopter gunners, ammo haulers and in a thousand other labors.
Proud, they ask not for handouts as much as what they figure
to be their deserved benefits.Some are just plain needy or unable to cope.
Taking care of them all is an enormous undertaking that costs around $58 billion
a year. Half a million are
in school courtesy of Uncle Sam. Each year, about 250,000 get home loans and
68,000 get job training. About 2.7 million get monthly pension checks —
including the widow of a Civil War soldier.All of this is administered by
a daunting federal bureaucracy second in size only to the Defense Department.
The Department of Veterans Affairs operates more than a thousand
hospitals, clinics and nursing homes where it gives medical care to about
4 million veteran patients and dispenses some $4 billion in prescription drugs
a year.VA medical care
is free to honorably discharged veterans injured on military duty and to low-income
vets. Others must make modest payments for medical and dental care.
If Bill Gates were a disabled combat veteran, he could get free medical care and almost-free medication from VA.“No nation on Earth has demonstrated more compassion, more generosity to those who served in uniform than the U.S.A.,” maintained VA’s pugnacious chief, Anthony Principi, who was a riverboat commander in Vietnam’s notorious Mekong Delta.Even so, there are limits. Every year, Congress tells Principi how much he can spend. Every year, he has to stretch that money further. Every month, 60,000 new claims pour into VA offices, overwhelming clerks and flooding the system.
When Principi took over in January 2001, the waiting list for VA benefits was more than 900,000 people, including 280,000 who had waited six months or more for medical care.Scanning those numbers, Principi went ballistic. The native New Yorker, who grew up in the Bronx and was commissioned from the U.S. Naval Academy, he waded into the mess swinging both fists, using tactics he learned to keep men alive in combat.“Focus, discipline, leadership and accountability! I set goals! Here’s what we’re gonna do!” he told his 230,000 employees.“They never had that before in government,” he chuckled.
The waiting list has been pared to about 350,000 and gets whittled down by thousands each month. But the issue of VA health care is more complicated.Surprisingly, given mankind’s long experience with war, the understanding of what war does to man is incomplete and elusive.How to measure war’s effects, whether or how to compensate for them, even how to treat the symptoms still are questions of angry controversy that swirl around such hot-button topics as Agent Orange and Persian Gulf War illness, homeless and mentally handicapped vets and, in the world of limited budgets, who gets what.And not all wounds are visible.
Here comes a platoon of men out into the Legion Hall parking lot in Berkley, breathing their beery vapor into the crisp autumn dark, calling a last goodbye and take care now, cranking up their family vans and motorcycles to ride back into lives as firefighters, office managers, lovers, parents.Ordinary folks. Who could tell?
One of them has a brother, a GI who led a combat patrol in ’Nam. There came a crack and down went his radioman and the GI turned as if in a dream and saw a 6-year-old boy standing expressionless. Big brown eyes. A .45-caliber pistol taped by the Viet Cong to his hand, the huge weapon smoking from a lucky shot, and the GI without conscious thought stitched him in half with a burst of his M-16 and went on with the patrol. But he never was the same.
So when talk of war with Iraq stirs talk of wars past, bad stuff bubbles up. “Until tonight,” said a man at the Berkley hall, “I hadn’t thought of or talked about this stuff for 30 years.”Predictably, in the next few days, come his terrible screaming nightmares, inexplicable rage and unfocused despair.
“I have no doubt the casualties will be very heavy, the emotional costs and casualties,” Dr. Renato Alarcon said of potential combat in Iraq.Alarcon, a psychiatrist, teaches at Emory University. Until earlier this year he was chief of mental health at the Atlanta VA Medical Center.
Psychiatric casualties, what used to be called battle fatigue
or even cowardice, often are long-term conditions that in later years can
be intensified by alcohol or drug abuse and other problems that cause what
is politely called “social alienation.”Between 1995 and 2001,
Alarcon told a Senate committee in July, demand for veterans’ mental
health care
rose 26 percent while the VA mental-health-care budget went up only 9 percent.“The
quality of care has suffered,”
Alarcon said in an interview. “You don’t have time, with a patient
who is traumatized and panicky, to do individual psychotherapy, or talk about
the side effects of his medicine.”“Veterans are neglected,”
said Jack Burnett, 71, a former hospital comptroller whose VFW chapter in
Whitman, Mass., recently helped raise $10,000 for hospitalized veterans.
Nationally, the VFW — one of several national veterans service organizations — raises about $30 million a year and serves some 8 million volunteer hours in VA hospitals and other veterans programs. In many communities, evening bingo, benefit auctions and volunteer-served roast beef dinners for homeless veterans are events woven into the everyday fabric of life.
But veterans are aging, and so are volunteers. Fewer veterans
serve in Congress, and each year fewer Americans even
know a veteran.That’s a loss, some veterans say. But they don’t
mourn the passage of peaceful years.“There’s nothing
good about war; it’s a dirty business,” said a veteran named Bob,
a mental patient at the Brockton VA Medical Center,
as he carefully worked his way through a roast beef dinner put on by the VFW
post in Chatham, at Cape Cod’s elbow.
“We ought to think about it first,” said Bob, a
man with many missing teeth, surplus-store clothes and dead eyes. “War
with Iraq would just be another fiasco.”Years later, on another chilly
night, there will be stories like those told around the Legion Hall’s
back table in Berkley. There will come a lengthening pause, and someone will
say softly, “I was good at it,
I kept my guys alive.”
One day sometime after your first firefight, he will say, you get the thousand-yard stare and after that there is no conscience. You live to bring your kids home and you do whatever that takes. Some guys learn to live with that and some guys don’t and if you don’t you are lost forever and there are many people like that.Lost forever.
How can Americans ever recognize or repay such experience? The
question is considered only briefly by David Woods,
who fought with the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division along Route 1 in South
Vietnam. He was wounded there, fought on, and was wounded again, and again.Woods,
54, is muscular and shaggy, a federal investigator, a tough man who speaks
softly. Slowly, he extended his hand across the plywood table. Tears swim
in his eyes.“Welcome home,” he said with a powerful and gentle
handshake.
The words are both a simple greeting and a deep acknowledgment.“All you gotta say. Welcome home.”
David Wood can be contacted at david.wood@newhouse.com.
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